Publication pollution

A recent commentary in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, highlights most academics and those less academic, already knew – the need and desire to publish is a disease, aided by “plagiarism, fraud and predatory publishing.” Academics – held sacred by a vanishing few – now means brutal business and what comes out is mostly noise, stolen materials and joint incompetence. The acceleration seen in “academic publishing,” is a clear indication that the quality has declined and more importantly the authors mostly rely on a patchwork of stolen materials and ideas.

This is unfortunate. Knowledge creation, still the only attribute that marginally differentiates humans and animals, has been on the decline for decades. Information and noise, mistakenly attributed to knowledge by technologists, have been creating havoc. The “data explosion,” and the ever eluding “singularity,” have kept the precious little brain cells away from advancing knowledge. To top it all off, the ambassadors of knowledge creation have been busy plagiarizing and creating irrelevant publications.

Misaligned incentives, aided by limited time horizons of knowledge seekers, are likely to assure that humans will continue the rat race in a maze with no exits.

WISE, Not!

Recent news that NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory found no tell-tale signs of advanced societies in 100,000 galaxies studied, is a constant reminder that ET is likely more advanced than the big brains at the space agency. Blindly following the speculation made more than 50 years ago, that mid-infrared emissions in a Galaxy could be indicative of a dominant civilization of galactic scope, the engineers seem to have gotten it wrong, yet again.

And they will get it wrong many times in this century. An advanced society is one that does not emit radiation, something that does not show up in the archaic instruments created by the least interesting species in the universe. An advanced society is one that will have no intention to dominate, let alone “conquer” the resources offered by a galaxy. Stupid humans, driven by ego and materialism, seem to be assuming that “domination,” is hard-wired into intelligent life. Intelligence is least likely to be about “cornering resources,” and an advanced society is one that will leave no tell-tale signs or bread crumbs for the stupid to detect them.

Radiation seeking humans, constantly looking for TV programs to tune into from other galaxies, will be left sorely disappointed. If ET exists, it will absolutely assure that there will be no “contact.” After all, who would like to contact a species, that burns fossil fuels in a limited green house they are afforded, constantly fighting and killing each other for irrational belief systems and fleeting wealth, segment themselves into color, geography, language and physical proportions, cast a blind eye to those with poor initial conditions and completely incompetent in advancing knowledge.

ET has fascinated many – but it will likely remain a fascination.

Stuck in the weeds

Yet another policy choice and the reaction of our fearless leaders to it, show the level of ignorance and incompetence the country has to get over before it can advance further. The magic leaf has been with humans for thousands of years and it shows significant medical advantages already. Because of its status, research has been dampened and we have a large number of people sitting in jail for a crime because of legalese. Those who wear the badge of “free markets,” elsewhere should engage in introspection and remove the inconsistencies in their policy choices.

In addition to the limits, there has to be education and competence requirements for people who want to legislate. I do not mean “self certification,” but hard constraints including exams that politicians have to pass before they can run for important policy positions. The gap between the current generation and the ones in Washington is big and it is getting bigger every passing day. If doctors, engineers and scientists have to demonstrate competence through structured tests, it is unclear why this is not the case for those who could have profound impact on a large number of people. Educational Testing Services – please take note and design a PAT – Politics Admission Test – that could have weeded out the crop that is currently legislating.

Stuck in the weeds and frozen in time, our leaders are unlikely to move society to a better state.
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Engineers discover probabilities

Recent news that MIT engineers have finally discovered probabilities is heartening news. A “probabilistic programming language,” they “invented” appears to be quite competitive to conventional systems for vision and cognition. It is always better to arrive late rather than not at all. Determinism, the bane of engineering, has kept many bright minds back for long.

There have been weak attempts at the same many decades before. After the hype of Artificial Intelligence waned in the towering institutions of the East and the West in the 80s, some feeble attempts at programming in logic surfaced in unknown quarters. Such programming was all about probabilities – and it had no prescriptive GoTo statements. The originators underestimated the wrath of engineers – who generally knew everything there is to know. Prolog was shown the grave before it arrived.

Machine learning, the latest hype, has some potential – but not in the hands of engineers with deterministic education. Perhaps, the next generation can leave the legacy of ego and ignorance behind and really make something happen.

Frustrated

Recent research from Princeton that attempts to spin yet another particle – spinon – to “explain” frustrated magnets, is symptomatic of trying to fit existing (old) theories into observations. Contemporary education and learning institutions are so inflexible that they are simply unable to break away from tradition. If observations do not fit a theory, it is better to ask if the theory is right rather than incrementally attaching an error that is yet to be proven. Sure, writing papers are easier this way but it is unlikely to advance knowledge.

If magnets are not behaving as expected, it is ok to call them “frustrated.” But to hypothesize a particle that may explain such frustration is fiction. This is dangerous research  - as experience tells us that, once “speculated,” it shall be “proven” in Physics – either by unachievable mathematics or by generating mind numbing noise from experiments. It is ironic that there has been only a single individual for over hundred years who could create a framework to think in Physics.

Educational institutions, world over, adept at producing “bricks in the wall,” graduates – engineers, scientists and doctors – prisoners of the status-quo, have to rethink – and quick.

Stop time

Stopping time appears to have several advantages. The trick is the modality of stoppage. If time is stopped with an incremental move, say a day, and then repeated in an infinite loop and if information transfer is allowed at the boundaries, then knowledge can increase infinitely. Biological systems, with a hard expiry date, have been inefficient in the transfer of information across space-time. The Fermi paradox is an important notion in this context. Biology, appears to be highly inferior to systems that perpetuate – either through time or space.

Search for extra-terrestrial life does not make any sense in this vein. An advanced society is most likely to harness gravity and stop time rather than travel across space or even show themselves on Radar. The epitome of modern transportation – humans packed like sardines in an aluminum can with wings – should provide a hint that travel is the least of things an advanced society would do. The idiots with the telescope and antennas in the heart of Silicon Valley never asked why an advanced society will show themselves to their inferior finding techniques. My tax dollars are better spent elsewhere.

Humans, the least likely species to search the heavens for their next of kin, may be getting ahead of themselves. The fact that they found a toy to scan the skies, does not mean that it is the best use of their time.

The “habitable zone”

A recent publication in the “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,” uses “heavy Mathematics,” to show that there could be billions of stars in the milky way alone with multiple planets in the “habitable zone,” defined as the existence of “acceptable” temperatures with the possibility of water. Humans, are funny animals – with all their brain power and scientific knowledge, they are perfectly happy extrapolating from a single observation. The embarrassing use of Mathematics in the calculation of the probability of life in the Milky Way itself, that appears to be indistinguishable from 1.0, may surface many questions.

High energy Physics, not significantly different from fiction, is clinging to century old theories, that explain less than 4% of the observations. Meanwhile, ego driven space administrations, are on the edge, not being able to prove extra-terrestrial life, something they strongly feel should have been done by now. The tiny slice of space-tine, handed to humans, apparently is not a constraint for the big brains, who have adroitly forecasted the arrival of green women in less than twenty years, albeit, the proof could be less compelling than the “encounters of the fourth kind.” Meanwhile, the famous one in England, worried about the green variety life not being friendly, strongly admonishes against the search for the same. Clearly, there is content here befitting day time soap.

The only known habitable zone, a quirk in space time, could be easily destroyed before its occupants find another.

Lifeless water world

Recent news that Ganymede, Jupiter’s famous moon, may house more water than the Earth, is interesting. NASA’s bold claim that they “shall find” extra-terrestrial life in less than 20 years, should be viewed with abundant caution in this context. If significant water worlds in close proximity to Earth are lifeless, one has to question the logic of looking for water across space. The problem is that, once hypothesized, nothing remains unproven in contemporary science.

If Ganymede has underground oceans that rival the Earth, all efforts should be focused on finding life there – not in distant galaxies. If the presence of water is a necessary condition for life to emerge, as argued by the famous and the systematic, then they have to focus on the many instances of water in the solar system itself. If attempts at finding life in these close quarters come empty, then one has to question both the idea that life could exist elsewhere and if water is a necessary condition for life. One cannot have it both ways. Just as the “Higgs Boson” surfaced in mindless noisy data, it will not be sufficient to show spectral noise of oxygen and water, somewhere in a distant galaxy and claim extra-terrestrial life. Scientists, with egos that rival the stupid, have shown a weakness when it comes to proving stated hypotheses – and never even considering the alternative. But then, tenure and publications are more important than real science.

If there is only one observation of life ridden mass in the entire universe, then, the probability remains close to zero to find it elsewhere. No amount of mathematical manipulation is going to make this probability higher. And, if life cannot be found in conditions that are assumed to be favorable, the probability of extra-terrestrial life gets even less. It is depressing to think that the samples of life that can be observed on Earth, are indeed the best the universe could come up with. But that does not mean that they exist elsewhere.

Limited imagination

 
And then, she could see the heavens beyond her imagination
Out in the distance, Quasars shine but the physicists do not know
Near in time, people die, but the intelligentsia does not know
Champaign flows and the suits in glass houses get religion
 
8 Billion, too few to count, but too many for those, counting pennies
Brain cells, a liability for most, have failed again to make an impact
They sever heads in the East and intelligence in the West
It is, indeed, a show, nobody should miss
 
Blonde hair, racism and democratic intent on television and media
The ones in the South adhering to belief and those in the North to principles
Neither wins nor do they advance humanity
It seems futile and irrelevant to those with brains over their shoulders
 
Humans, complex animals and a quirk of evolution, normalize again
They should not be here, but now, they are ready to inflict damage
To themselves, and anything they may touch and destroy
They cannot measure damage, they write history with glowing language
 
Time, the only artifact with power, shall erase every action and thought
And space, inferior to time, shall close in on the incompetent and stupid
The predictable collapse, cannot be anticipated by those with constraints
But then, the question remains for the few who may be left behind

Small noise

Recent research from Penn State (1) surfaces interesting questions on privacy in the modern world. Privacy has become a stumbling block in the use of valuable data for research and business purposes. Penn State team advocates adding small noise to data to achieve “differential privacy.” Privacy, a theme picked up by regulators with little knowledge of technology, has to be advanced by foundational mathematics. High tech giants, makers of search, faces, operating systems, databases, flashy hardware and next-quarter’s profits, are ill-equipped to solve this problem.

Research has been lagging. Privacy is a mathematical problem and not a data problem. With less than 8 billion samples across the world, it should be relatively easy to assure privacy if its is solved systematically. Regulators, lost in time and space, are attempting to use archaic tools to solve a problem, they deem important. And, big businesses, who want to hoard and abuse data are unlikely to play. Hence, this is a problem, only academics can solve.

Privacy, as important as education and health in the modern context, can only be protected by the application of mathematics. With few distinct samples with limited time horizons, it should not tax academic minds, if they focus on it.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/02/16/social.network.analysis.privacy.tackled

Value of society’s health

Policy makers, both sides of the aisle and across the pond, often seem to miss the big picture. Sure, a democratic system that works in 4 and 5 year election cycles, is not amenable to strategy. Healthcare, a lighting rod for idiots running for office, is a complex question. For most of their history, humans were driven by simple objective functions – food and sex, dominating anything else. In the modern world, for most, the equation has not changed much. Although the village elders may have thought strategically about the health of the clan, as managing a portfolio of men and women with high specialization is not a trivial problem, such ideas did not flow much further.

The idea of society, an abstract concept, is very new. In the modern context of interconnected humans by technology, the definition of society certainly has been expanded. Facebook boasts of a society, nearly billion strong and that system is not significantly different from China and India. Although politicians would like to cleanly divide populations by faith, ignorance and color, fitting them neatly into societal fragments, such ideas have been rendered obsolete for a while.

Assuming that one can clearly understand societies – an interconnected organism - then one can envision the best way to nourish it. The foundational elements of a modern society are health and education. Every participant benefits from positive externalities associated with these common goods. Thus, policy imperatives that substantially enhance health and education should be dominant in a modern society. However, the tactics of implementation differ significantly. Health, for example, is as much the responsibility of an individual as it is of the society. Thus, an individual who does not care for her health and education (societal goods) cannot be helped by society. Her actions, then, will be against utility maximization for herself and more importantly, for the society.

Upgrading a society is likely a two-step process – first, information has to be widely available to all participants including the society’s objective function. Then market forces have to take over to move the system to a better state – providing appropriate incentives and disincentives to all participants as long as there are no market failures. If market failures are present in the provision and use of common goods, they have to be removed through appropriately designed constraints. And, all policies have to be consistently implemented.

It seems unlikely that modern humans can design next level societies as they seem to lack necessary knowledge and skills.

Cultural slippage

Human societies, from inception, have shown a positive slope, albeit small, toward higher culture – defined by a better and abstract understanding of extra-self. Arguably, contemporary modern humans show measurable slippage in culture. Alarmingly, this could be big enough to reverse many centuries of progress. The instruments used to sustain a positive slope in culture for centuries, such as religion, are largely responsible for reversing the trend, now.

For most of the history of the upstart humans, it was art that provided the fuel for a positive cultural slope. For the past several centuries, however, science has taken a dominant role. But it has been inferior to provide a sustaining momentum to the human psyche. Materialism, that spreads like cancer, coupled with prescriptive science, has largely assured that the trend reversal is permanent. It has been successful in dividing the world into tiny fragments, each apparently different but certainly fighting the rest. It is ironic that at the peak of pride for technologists, the world shows signs of humans returning to their origins, when little technology was present.

The slope of cultural progress, the only tangible measure of advancement for the human mind, has turned negative again with little chance of yet another reversal.

The utility of strategy

Strategy, a long term view of evolving uncertainty, has been misunderstood. Blue chip consulting firms and investment banks - sultans of PowerPoint and handlers of boardroom dramatics, have been leading firms in the wrong direction for decades. Business schools, filled with those adept at finance and accounting, have been drilling the wrong stuff into the brains of every budding graduate. The economy is suffering from ”stratgeists” and not from the lack of them.

Strategy, however, is a useful construct, not for individuals or organizations but for society. For the society, it provides guidance to nourish a stable, productive and improving population, able to propagate the human genes, across space and time. For individuals and organizations, with limited decision and harvesting horizons, strategy provides negative value. This inherent conflict – the whole benefiting from longer horizon thinking but not the parts, means that the former is likely to lose. Utility maximization for an individual or organization, is inherently constrained by limited time horizons and tacticians, indeed, add more value.

Strategy has to be redefined – it is not about entering new markets, culling dogs and embracing stars, maximizing equity value, next quarter’s earrings or next year’s bonuses. Strategy is a notion that may help assess and improve humanity.

Is living longer, better?

Statistics have been clear, humans are living longer (1). India, projected to be the most populous country in the world as the Chinese have been systematically controlling the birth/death ratio for long, cunningly culling the variety that could create more, has been able pump up nearly 20% of the world population to longer life expectancy. In India today, one is expected to live till 65 and the world at large to 71. The more important question is whether living longer is better.

Biological systems are preprogrammed to maximize life span. The basic equation is driven by reproductive requirements and those living longer are more likely to transmit their DNA to the next generation. Nature, with little flexibility to adjust to technological advances, seems to have gotten it wrong. Living longer is the biggest liability in the modern world, controlled by humans, who do not think straight. Today, over 80% of the healthcare costs of an individual is attributed to the last year of her life. For the individual, waiting to fade away in dignity, extension of life is likely utility destroying.

There could be an optimal life span for a human driven by the status of technology and the availability of resources. Moving outside such bounds is unlikely to be good and this has policy implications for medicine, education and societal formation.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/12/18/life.expectancy.increases.globally.death.toll.falls.major.diseases

Living on the edge

A recent article published in the open access journal ZooKeys (1) shows that the 10 Km wide asteroid that impacted the Earth, 65 million years ago – famous for removing the dominant species at that time, nearly terminated the weaklings, the mammals, as well. The paper portrays a picture that is striking – the placental mammals that dominate the world today – from mice to women – just got lucky. They do not seem to posses any significant advantages but the conditions afforded by the trauma, removed all competition, allowing them to thrive.

If mammals were any wiser, they would analyze this event in depth. Dinosaurs had technology – largely supported by biology but the discontinuity made the status-quo technology, a liability. Humans, apparently, on top of the food chain today, seem to be proud of their technology as well – most of which are finely tuned to current conditions. Their societies seem to have morphed into systems with little networked flexibility. Any minor perturbation could send them galloping back 50,000 years – hunting for food and sex, aided by a volatile organ, an evolutionary mishap, on their shoulders. Technology would not matter in such a discontinuity.

10 Km wide space debris are like pebbles in a system, teaming with primordial matter, sprinkled across an irrelevant planetary system at the boundaries of a less than ordinary galaxy, in a bubble universe, member of an infinite multiverse. Such an event is a near certainty for a planet that is in a straight jacket in limited space-time.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/12/17/asteroid.wiped.out.dinosaurs.may.have.nearly.knocked.mammals.too

BELLA rules

Recent news that the Berkeley Lab has achieved an energy of 4.25 Giga Volts in a miniature accelerator, 9 centimeters long on a desktop, continues on a profitable path to next level of discoveries in Physics. Traditionalists, steeped in the philosophy of “size matters,” have been on the wrong track for over 50 years. They dug tunnels and abandoned them in Texas and they dug longer on the other side of the pond, that could prove pretty much anything in the midst of mind-numbing noise in the data. Size and volume do not matter, insights do.

It is ironic that scientists bow to engineers in an effort to make fundamental discoveries. Engineers, bored out of their wits, need no invitation to build ever bigger guns. This combination is deadly – it is costly and it takes away any possibility of fundamental discoveries in Physics – Not the Nobel seeking ones, but real ones. Einstein's obscure paper on LASER would have given a favorable direction 100 years ago for the brilliant minds of this century. But in the midst of mediocrity, some even nourishing visions of accelerators, the size of the solar system, it was all about size. BELLA thinks differently – and that ultimately could make a difference to the “dark” ages of Physics – where anything inexplicable is tagged with “dark.”

Few provide insights – but many publish, build and run experiments.

Simplification

A recent paper in Nature and Communications that demonstrates that wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle in Physics can be explained by the same fundamental theoretical constructs, is instructive at multiple levels. First, incentives in the scientific and academic world has long been skewed toward the ability to publish – and often this means repackaging old wine in a new bottle. And, second, educational systems world over have missed a trick – learning the “established theories,” is a sheer waste of time for the next generation. In Physics, Medicine and Economics, most established theories are known to be wrong – as they do not explain observations or provide complex explanations that cannot be tested.

Engineering progress – largely based on empirical approximations of incorrect theories – does not necessarily mean that the knowledge content of humans is increasing. In some sense, it is the opposite. Educational institutions strive to drill complexity into the heads of budding engineers and doctors – draining any innate creativity. In effect, Universities manufacture zombies and automatons, steeped in tradition and the status-quo, unable to question or even think beyond what is in the text books. The idea that text books could be wrong is a major shock to the “educated,” as they have invested most of their lives learning what has been written down. But, writing something down and perpetuating it across generations, does not necessarily mean that it is correct. Modern technologies allow more rapid propagation of ignorance.

Simplification has to be the fundamental building block of knowledge creation in a world, mired in complexity and misaligned incentives.

Irrational life

Humans are often thought of as utilitarian, able to maximize individual and societal utility. In this scheme, however, life itself is irrational. With a hard constraint on time to expiry for the individual, society and the environment at large, extending all the way to the small part of an instance of the multiverse that is visible, utility itself loses all meaning. Utility, then, has to be defined in the micro – there is no impact an individual can make on the universe, she has been assigned to. But she could, certainly, enhance utility for herself within the hard constraints that exist – time, space and the limitations of knowledge.

Individual, then, provides any reliable subset of the measurement of utility. There are many parameters in this complex function, mediated largely by initial conditions. In very limited horizons, it appears sustaining herself is paramount. Sustenance, however, seems to have differing meaning for different people. The cost of sustenance appears to linearly increase with wealth. Perhaps, the slope of utility is a more meaningful measure for the individual. If so, those who start with a higher cost of sustenance are less likely to be able to enhance individual utility. For this cohort, life is even more irrational than the populace at large.

Life, a highly irrational notion, continues with inexplicable regularity.

Millennials’ tech

A recent article in the International Journal of Business Information Systems investigates how social networking could be used positively during campus emergencies. The generation gap between the young and the old has been growing at such a rapid rate that the knowledge held by the young encompasses most of what is relevant for the future. Octogenarians in the Congress, aging bearcats that govern the economy and those waiting to retire at the top of large organizations are slowing down technology progress to such an extent that most in universities today will never consider working for a company or voting. Recent elections that swept a “red wave” across the country accounted for a 35% turn out – most showing up to send their relatives back to Washington.

The millennials certainly have the technology – to eliminate crime, to grow knowledge and to create next level societies. If the “wise men,” could remove the shackles, they can grow a lot faster. For the status-quo, findings such as “social networking has a positive effect in emergencies,” seem to be a new revelation – but for the millennials, it is part of their life. The internet – as described once by a policy maker as “a series of tubes,” has taken a toll – not only on the ego of those who came before but also their ability to be effective. This has happened before – airplanes and computers themselves opened up discontinuities that separated generations – and it will happen again.

Those, unwilling to admit ignorance at the face of accelerating technology, will destroy knowledge, wealth and the security of future generations.

Sunny value destroyers

A recent article in the Review of Accounting Studies, that apparently demonstrates CEOs with “sunny dispositions,” –  have a positive impact on stock price, is symptomatic of the time and money wasted by accounting and those who research it. Accounting, the bane of corporate America, deploys so many people – in Wall Street and inside companies, measuring, monitoring and reporting numbers - that have little impact on shareholder value. Part of the blame has to go to business schools, still steeped in tradition, graduating people with irrelevant skills for the modern world.

Shareholder value is seldom created by accounting or “sunny dispositions” of the CEO or the CFO, as claimed by the article. Apparently, the authors mistake bumps in stock price as shareholder value – it is not so. However, “sunny,” the reporter is, those who invest in the stock of the company, do care about the real assets of the firm and how they are growing. They do not really care how “gold plated,” the investment banker is and how McSleasy the consulting firm is. And BS, has an expiry date.

The idea that dressing up numbers and reporting them with a sunny disposition enhances the value of the firm has no empirical validation. 

Economic value of segregation

Humans, still fundamentally driven by visible features, created by less than 1% of their DNA, could be ahead of themselves as they struggle to create better societies and structures. Their recent arrival on a planet, substantially more sophisticated than themselves, signaled a regime change – preferential to tactics than strategy. For 100 thousand years, a mere glimpse of space time, they have been struggling to sustain a clan structure – first created by proximity, then by the shape of the skull and distance between the eyes and in the modern world, apparently by the color of the skin, the least compelling of the segregation schemes they have been able to devise.

If humans are unwilling and unable to rise over their mental constraints – one has to sympathize with them as they had very little experience with it. It appears that societal utility could be enhanced by segregation in transition, something that may extend over a century. A recent study shows that humans tend to segregate when the space occupied – say in a city – hits a threshold level. This indicates that a hard wired need to segregate exists in every one of the currently existing 7.2 billion specimens. Countries provide an efficient segregation scheme and for half the word’s population, the problem reduces to regional schemes – language, imperceptible shades of skin color, height and food. In any case, the need to segregate is as fundamental as the human itself.

Although it may be alarming for some to consider, it is possible that segregation is utility maximizing in transition to a higher level society. The planet, a sitting duck in the midst of space debris, may need to consider local and temporal maximization of utility – and segregation could be a dominant policy choice to maximize societal value.

Ubiquitous Quantum

Recent observations from Princeton (1),  published in the Journal of Nature Chemistry advances the productive frontier of the intersection of Physics and Chemistry to influence biological systems. Scientists steeped in their chosen disciplines, chasing dead ends, have substantially reduced innovation potential and societal utility in the last few decades. The use of quantum mechanical modeling to expand our understanding of chemical properties and their interactions with biological systems is in the right direction. However, traditional life sciences companies do not have the skills or expertise to take advantage of this expanding knowledge.

Physics, the foundation of everything, is not understood well by scientists engaged in the use of chemical actions to impact even less understood biological systems. Chemistry, an inelegant and incomplete bridge, has effected a deadlock on innovation by encouraging incremental benefits. Better understanding of the nature and intent of electrons and the ability to predict their dancing clusters, may allow better design of interventions of biological systems by chemical means. More importantly, this may also open up possible magnetic and electric intervention pathways, something the status-quo appears to have little interest in.

Innovation is about the application of new ideas – it is not about incrementally improving what is existing.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/11/20/quantum.mechanical.calculations.reveal.hidden.states.enzyme.active.sites

Stochastically Jumping without a clue

Recent research from NYU (1) that apparently demonstrates that the modeling techniques used to forecast stock market fluctuations could be used to predict animal behavior – in this case, movements of zebrafish – ignores many fundamental aspects of modeling. First, unknown to most people in the financial industry, stock market fluctuations cannot be predicted.In spite of the proclamations of a recent Nobel laureate, who claims he could smell a bubble anytime anywhere, he is still to demonstrate a usable prediction ex.ante. And, high flying hedge fund managers, without insider knowledge, could never create alpha – risk adjusted excess returns, systematically. And, second, equating animal behavior modeling to stock market predictions shows a level of incomprehension in both areas.

Stochastic jumps do occur – the problem with such things is that they are not predictable. Perhaps what the NYU team is missing is the right language – the characteristics of the underlying process of the movement of the zebrafish appear to have stochastic jumps in it. But that has nothing to do with stock market modeling – an oxymoron. The reason the zebrafish is jumping stochastically is the same why stock markets do at times – arrival of new information. And, by definition these are not predictable.

As trillion $ slosh around an industry with no value added to society, further research toward predictions of stochastic jumps seems unwarranted.
(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/11/13/stock.market.models.help.nyu.researchers.predict.animal.behavior

The scope of ignorance

The scope of space and time appears incomprehensibly large – covered by what is visible to us in a narrow slice, covering 15 billion years and speculated to be at least ten times as large, beyond the horizon. This knowledge, albeit imperfect, has not awakened the intellect of the homo sapiens, most still locked in tactical struggle for basic necessities and the rest, perpetuating ignorance in every action and thought.

The scope of human ignorance is at least as fascinating as the artifacts of space and time. Their arrival on a planet that is impossible to detect in space-time – a completely insignificant event – seem to be of great importance to them.The most ignorant of the lot – the religious – seem to engage in such acts that a child would find objectionable. On the other hand, the intelligentsia, claiming superiority, simply make up stuff, as if they are allowed to do so. The most ignorant believe that color of skin and hair and useless religious beliefs are, somehow important. On the other hand, the intellectuals and academics, having figured everything out, wait in amazement why the world has already ended.

Humans, the most comical construct, will continue their journey to the abyss of ignorance.

Policy by convenience

A recent study from Duke (1) showing that politicians believe or disbelieve in scientific theories, primarily based on their policy orientation, should not come as a surprise to anybody who has been watching the campaigns. This is also the reason that half the country has checked out of the process, with no intent of ever returning. This number will continue to increase as more objective millennials take hold of an archaic system ran by octogenarians. The question is how long it will take to clean up the system currently dominated by a few people, with little understanding of science, technology and accelerating knowledge.

Climate change has been an interesting area of contention, as noted by the Duke study. It appears that politicians with free market based policies tend to disbelieve that it is happening. And those, with a passion for severely regulating everything to save the world, believe the world has already ended. This is an unfortunate side effect. Science and analysis should guide policy as forecasts and expectations are not religious. However, forecasts have significant uncertainty and policy alternatives often present flexibility – both in terms of timing as well as choices. Scientists, heady with data and modern tools, have all but sure that the fate of the blue planet is sealed. However, policy is about trade-offs, something academics do not seem to appreciate well. And, any trade-off decision needs to avoid premature exercise of options based on known (but uncertain) data, when waiting is often optimal for policy actions.

It is a conundrum – we have ignorant politicians attempting policy and dogmatic scientists, crying wolf. Neither is likely to get it right.

(1) Denying problems when we don't like the political solutions. Published: Friday, November 7, 2014 - 04:43 in Psychology & Sociology. eScience

Awakening by exercise

Exercise has been in the news – as the only non-medical route to avoid diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. It appears to be a good idea, especially in moderate amounts. But a healthy body without a healthy mind is value destroying for the individual and society. Not to be left behind, video games and other mind-exercising technology sites have been gearing up to awaken the little old grey cells. But they all seem to be missing the bigger picture.

The human brain, an energy hog and complex, does not exercise by playing games or solving puzzles on the computer screen. There is a lot of power behind the veil and most often, the organ simply retires to boredom. By feeding it prescriptive education and jobs that take nothing, society has been playing a losing game. The human brain has, substantially detached from the status-quo, for the problems fed to it seem so trivial and irrelevant.

Content, questions with the scope of the universe strategically and the world, more tactically, could possibly awaken the sleeping organ. More importantly, an advancing society could stitch live brains together to rediscover imagination, a feeling that has been dead for long.

White alpha

A recent study from Michigan State University seems to prove what the Chicago school has been asserting for nearly half a century. Although the study claims to be “first of its kind,” the conclusions have been known to most academics for long. There is no alpha – risk adjusted excess returns – anywhere. And, by implication, a blind man, a high flying hedge fund manager or a super-smart financial advisor has an equal chance of making random alpha in the market.

Mad and fast money experts on financial TV have been perpetuating a farce. The only alpha they make is the money they get paid by the producers of the show. That is indeed, alpha - if they spent that time trading, they would have lost money and alpha, if they knew what that meant. A trillion $ sloshes around the markets – idiots trading back and forth – as if it means something. Then, there are tens of thousand of “financial advisors,” most not qualified to advise anybody and the rest helping to destroy wealth systematically, in fees. The financial services industry destroys wealth to that extent that if the industry is made illegal, the economy will grow by an additional couple of percentage points.

Value is only created by real companies, innovating and creating new products. Those, trying to monetize and trade on them, simply destroys value. And, those who “advises” the common woman on how to invest, destroys more.

Stating the obvious

A recent study that states that controlling Ebola in West Africa is the most effective way to decrease international risk (1) seems to state the obvious to most straight thinking humans. Hopefully, this study did not burn too much money proving what could have been obvious to any high school freshman in her sleep.

Yes, it is indeed better to stop Ebola in West Africa. However, it does not seem to have sunk in with the less endowed – politicians and celebrities. Ebola, the most incompetent virus, unable to transmit without physical contact and exchange of fluids, has been riding high. It has travelled far and wide, without paying airfare. It has made a joke out of those living in the most powerful state in the country, led by the incompetent. It has killed humans after they showed up for treatment in hospitals. And they have successfully jumped from human to human, apparently using protective gear.

Humans are, indeed, prone to dramatics – and more stupid than they could ever imagine.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/10/21/controlling.ebola.west.africa.most.effective.way.decrease.international.risk.paper